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Walt Whitman catalogues the workers and toilers, and lists their occupations in pages that will live; Millet shows us wood-gatherers, charcoal-burners, shepherds, gleaners, washerwomen, diggers, quarrymen, road laborers, men at the plow, and women at the loom. Then he shows the noon-hour, the moments of devotion, the joys of motherhood, the silent pride of the father, the love of brother and sister and of husband and wife. And again in the dusk of a winter night we see black-lined against the sky the bent figure of an old woman, bearing her burden of fagots; and again we are shown the plain, homely interior of a cottage where the family watches by the bedside of a dying child.

And always the picture is not quite complete–the faces are never distinct–no expression of feature is there, but the soul worked up into the canvas conveys its silent message to all those who have eyes to see and hearts to feel.

Only a love and sympathy as wide as the world could have produced the “Gleaners,” the “Sower” and the “Angelus.”

Millet was what he was on account of what he had endured. All art is at last autobiography.

The laborer’s cottage that he took at Barbizon had but three small, low rooms. These served as studio, kitchen and bedchamber. When the family had increased to eleven, other rooms were added, and the studio was transferred to the barn, there at the end of the garden.

Millet had two occupations, and two recreations, he once said. In the mornings he worked in his garden, digging, sowing, planting, reaping. In the afternoons he painted–painted until the sun got too low to afford the necessary light; then he went for his daily solitary walk through the woods and fields, coming back at dark. After supper he helped his wife with the housework, put the children to bed, and then sat and read until the clock struck midnight.

This was his simple life. Very slowly, recognition came that way. Theodore Rousseau, himself a great artist, and a man too great for jealousy, spread his fame, and the faithful Sensier in Paris lost no opportunity to aid his friend by the use of a commercial shrewdness in which Millet was woefully lacking.

Then came Corot, Daubigny, Diaz and others of giant stature, to Barbizon, and when they went back to Paris they told of Millet and his work. And then we find Meissonier, the proud, knocking at the gate of Le Grand Rustique.

It is pleasant to recall that Americans were among the first to recognize the value of Millet’s art. His “Sower” is the chief gem of the Vanderbilt collection; and the “Angelus” has been thought much more of in France since America so unreservedly set her seal upon it.

Millet died in Eighteen Hundred Seventy-five.

It was only during the last ten years of his life that he felt financially free, and even then he was far from passing rich. After his death his fame increased, and pictures he had sold for twenty dollars, soon changed hands for as many hundred.

Englishmen say that America grew Millet-mad, and it may be true that our admiration tipped a bit to t’ other side; yet the fabulous prices were not always paid by Americans–the rich men of earth vied with each other for the possession of a “Millet.”

The “Gleaners” was bought by the French Government for three hundred thousand francs, and is now in the Louvre “in perpetuity.” This sum paid for this one picture represents a larger amount of money than passed through the hands of Millet during his entire life; and yet it is not one-half what another “Millet” brought. The “Angelus” was sold for the sum of eight hundred thousand francs–a larger amount than was ever before paid for a single canvas.

It is idle to say that no picture is worth such a sum. Anything is worth what some one else will pay for it.

The number of “Millets,” it may be explained, is limited, and with men in America who have incomes of ten million dollars or more a year, no sane man dare prophesy what price the “Sower” may yet command.

Millet himself, were he here, would be aghast at the prices paid for his work, and he would turn, too, with disfavor from the lavish adulation bestowed upon his name.

This homely, simple artist was a profound thinker; a sympathetic dreamer; a noble-hearted, generous man; so truthful and lovable that his virtues have been counted a weakness; and so they are–for the planet Earth.